ABSTRACT
The settler colonial society of the Lower South invested more in formal education initiatives than scholars have recognized. That investment arose as a response to the tensions between learning and power in a sharply colonized place. Contestation and struggle over the broad and capacious field of learning by poorer whites and the colonized populations incited demand for formal education. It also incited prohibitions of literacy skills for enslaved people and even (eventually) free black people. Moreover, the growth of education demand for poorer whites was associated with the growth of exclusions of Indigenous people from society. Summarizing and reflecting on these findings, this chapter suggests implications for historians’ understandings of race formation and the rise of public education in the United States. Race and settler colonization shaped educational development history in the United State, not least by shaping it in the South. The United States continues to construct education policies, practices, and discourses with assumptions inherited from this early history.
